Paging Dr. Roget 

     When they decided to create a new group, 
     "Cripple" was the nearest pre-existing word.  

     But "cripple" doesn't include 
     the blind and the deaf and the slow of mind, 
     or even the halt, the lame, and the quadriplegic, 
     let alone diabetics, asthmatics, epileptics, and spastics, 
     those who have lost parts other than legs, 
     the victims of dust-induced anaphylactic shock, 
     and people who don't fit through a public-transit door.  

     They decided that "cripple" was a dirty word, 
     demeaning, 
     humiliating, 
     denoting a shameful condition that one must talk around.  

     They tried "Handicapped," 
     and the word is curiously fossilized 
     in parking spaces and on restroom doors, 
     But when you try to tack "handicapped" onto anyone specific 
     He is apt to take offense.  -- 

     "How dare you say I'm handicapped 
     Without ever asking me what I'm trying to do?  
     Is Stephen Hawkings handicapped in his profession?  
     If he requires an interpreter when he lectures, 
     Is that any different from the executive 
     Who can't type his own letters?"  

     Casting about desperately, 
     they noticed that the nameless group included 
     disabled soldiers, 
     disabled policemen, 
     disabled firemen, 
     disabled pilots, 
     disabled athletes --

     Ah, "disabled" has a fine and noble ring; 
     They could call them all "disabled."  
     Never mind that a man could be disabled as a soldier 
     and still play professional football.  

     "Disabled" served, 
     until computers got cheap 
     and people found out what "disabled" means.  

     Backpedalling furiously, they cried, 
     "No, no, we never meant disabled *persons* 
     Just persons with *disabilities*!"  

     Or maybe the differently-abled, or ...  

     The sputtering seems to have paused 
     on "physically challenged."  

     A physical challenge is an event, not a condition.  
     I await the next spasm.  

     -------------------------------------------------------------

     I have spent fifty years writing and editing, 
     I have often taken more than an hour 
     to polish one stained-glass phrase 
     into an invisible window of effortless prose, 
     I have learned many things, 
     Including this: 

     When you have no end of trouble in choosing a word, 
     Something is wrong with your concept.  



                                   Joy Beeson 
                                   12 December 1994